Where is Lizandra Góngora?

By Claudia Padrón Cueto.

Lizandra Góngora Espinoza.

Mexico City (CubaNet) – August 5, 2021. The last time she heard from Lizandra was on July 22, when Lizandra messaged her on Messenger through a fake profile created days earlier. Lizandra had a pact with her: she would contact her daily, even if it was just to send a thumbs-up in the chat. It was a sign that she was safe and sound. If her friend, who asked to remain anonymous, didn't hear from her within 24 hours, then she was to raise the alarm and report her missing.

In one of the audio messages Lizandra sent her, she sounds desperate. The 35-year-old Cuban woman tells her friend that she couldn't spend her life running away, that she had to raise her children. It was the first time the children had been away from her.

During the 11 days she was in hiding, almost no one knew her exact whereabouts. Some even reported her missing because she wasn't active on her accounts, but Lizandra was in hiding.

Given her unusual silence, her profile was flooded with posts tagging her and asking about her well-being. On the 16th, an acquaintance shared an audio recording of Lizandra, in which she said she was on the run, that her house was under siege as if she were a dangerous criminal, and that her children wouldn't stop crying. That same day, a photo of her leg with two deep, unstitched wounds began circulating. Almost no one knew for sure what had happened to her.

Meanwhile, when others close to her wrote to her, she only said she was in the mountains, without giving any further details. This way she didn't betray the woman who had given her shelter, nor did she risk the police coming looking for her.

On the 23rd, her friend didn't receive the agreed-upon message and wrote to her. She waited until the next day and sent another message. Lizandra never read the texts, so her friend assumed something had happened to her and decided to report her disappearance on social media.

Lizandra shouted freedom.

Lizandra Góngora fled her home on July 11 when she learned the police were looking for her after she participated in the protests in Güira de Melena, Artemisa. An acquaintance warned her that she would be accused of being a ringleader, and she didn't hesitate. She had long been on the radar of State Security. This was an opportunity they would seize to get rid of her and make her name disappear among hundreds of complaints.

A few hours before escaping, she had joined the demonstration in her town, which rose up like more than 90 other towns across Cuba. In one of the videos that surfaced from that day, she can be seen from behind, walking with the crowd. Lizandra appears in the video at the 10-minute mark. She is the woman wearing white shorts with black polka dots and a dark shirt. She, along with the other demonstrators, shouts “freedom” and “they have to go.” She didn't throw stones, she didn't hit anyone, she wasn't violent. She only asked for freedom.

A short time after that video, on Cuba Street, a group of protesters smashed some of the windows of a store. Lizandra, who was shouting from behind that this wasn't the way, that they should stop, was struck by two flying shards of glass that lodged in the back of her right leg. Immediately, her skin tore open and blood began to flow, leaving pieces of membrane hanging and the muscle exposed. She barely made it home because of the pain.

Lizandra Góngora Espinoza.

Lizandra later told her friend that, frightened, she threw some of her belongings into a backpack, called her children's father, and explained what had happened. Afraid of being prosecuted, she thought that running away for a while was best. So she did, without even getting her wounds stitched. But where could she run on an island full of eyes? How long would she be safe before being discovered? Her children, ages 14, 9, 8, and 3, stayed with their father. Her eldest daughter, 17, lives with Lizandra's mother on the Isle of Youth.

Who is Lizandra?

Lizandra Góngora Espinoza.

Lizandra Góngora is the woman who at night broadcast a cacerolazo (pot-banging protest) on her Facebook page, where she demanded freedom for political prisoners and denounced all the shortages people endure in Cuba.

Each live stream began with her saying, “Good evening, this is Lizandra.” Then she would narrate the life of a single mother in a country plagued by shortages and totalitarianism. Through her civic protests, she taught her children not to be afraid, not to remain silent. Her voice never wavered when she declared that Cuba was a dictatorship and demanded its end. Because of her activism, she was threatened through fake profiles, which only shared pro-regime propaganda, and she was harassed by the political police.

The children usually appeared alongside her in her videos, without speaking, until July 2nd when a couple of people from the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) knocked on her door to intimidate her. They told her that if her children continued appearing in her live streams with her, they would take custody of them because it was affecting the children's development. This is a common tactic used by State Security against women who dissent. Lizandra denounced the entire incident in a video.

“That’s why I say there’s a dictatorship in Cuba. To come to a single mother’s house and threaten her with taking her children away for teaching her true political ideals, that’s called cowardice,” Góngora declared at that moment.

From then on, she continued recording her live streams, but without the children. She couldn't risk them carrying out the threat and being separated from her.

Her last live broadcast was on July 8th. In the video, she invited everyone to publicly demand their stolen rights. Three days later, Cubans took to the streets for the first time in 60 years, and Lizandra joined them.

They only have the word of the police.

From the very day, the 22nd, when she stopped communicating, Ángel Delgado, Lizandra's ex-partner and the father of her children, was certain she had been arrested. Otherwise, she wouldn't have gone so long without hearing from the children.

So he started looking for her, but the police denied having any information about her. Instead, they repeatedly pressured Ángel to accuse her of child abandonment. Ángel was furious at the suggestion. Lizandra had always been a good mother. Besides, she hadn't left them with any stranger, but with him, the children's father. Nor had she left by choice.

For a week Ángel was sent from one place to another without reliable information, without anyone giving him certainty about what had happened to him.

A registry of people detained and disappeared following the protests, updated by activists and journalists with the assistance of Cubalex, had counted 45 people still missing on the island as of August 3. However, the figures in this registry may be lower than the actual numbers, as they mostly compile those reported on social media. For their part, the authorities not only withhold information on the matter but also deny that anyone has disappeared.

Lizandra was forcibly disappeared from July 22nd until the 29th, when they called Ángel to tell him that they had indeed detained her.

That's when he realized that while the authorities were denying him the whereabouts of his ex-partner and encouraging him to accuse her of abandonment, so they would have something more to prosecute her with, it was they who had her imprisoned.

“They told me she was at the Zanja station, so we went there, and they told us she wasn’t there. They sent us to Villa Marista, I sent other people, and they said she wasn’t there either, that they had taken her to Reloj Club, and we don’t know anything concrete. I have four minor children who are now under my custody, and they go to sleep every day at 3 in the morning, asking for their mother, crying,” he says.

Distraught, Delgado took a cell phone to the police station in his town, fully charged and with credit, so they could give it to Lizandra, wherever she was, and her children could hear her voice. However, that call never came.

The last news Ángel had of Lizandra was that she was in the Guatao women's prison, but that he couldn't see her for two weeks and couldn't call her either. She went from being missing to being held incommunicado. Her family only has the word of Lizandra's abusers, the same ones who denied her whereabouts for seven days. Can we believe the word of the abuser, the one who took her away arbitrarily and continues to violate her rights?

She is supposedly being kept in isolation due to COVID-19 protocols. Her ex-partner brought her only toiletries, but the officers refused to release her belongings. Essentially, he doesn't know if she's alright, and he wonders if she's even there. What condition are her injuries in? Are they being treated? Are they hiding her to cover up torture?

To this day, no one has seen her. No one has heard her voice.